Support Guide
Manage your brand's customer service with built-in support tools
From the Settings > Support area, you can define basic support ticket and email settings such as the Support Ticket Email Prefix, as well as setting the Support Email Domain for your store.
From the Ticket Types tab, you can set up a custom list of Ticket Types to categorize support inquiries, and define a the Display Order to control how they appear in the drop down menus. Note that Ticket Types also appear to the customer in their storefront account's support ticket area, so they may be selected when an inquiry is created.
29 Next features a fully-integrated Support Ticket system to streamline your customer service operations and keep your customer communications organized.
Navigate to Support > Tickets to see a list of all tickets. Narrow down the list of tickets by searching by ticket ID, subject, or the requester's email. Click Advanced to filter the tickets list by additional metrics.
To edit multiple tickets at once, select one or more tickets from the Tickets List view, choose Update, and apply updates in bulk to all of the selected tickets.
View all the tickets currently assigned to you under the Support > Tickets > Inbox tab. Using the tickets menu, you can also view all tickets in various statuses: Unassigned, Unsolved, Solved.
Customers of your store can create support tickets in two ways:
- 1.Via their storefront Customer Account, they can submit a Support request, which will create a support ticket linked to the customer.
- 2.Via your store's inbound Support Email address, they can email a request. Inbound emails from a customer's email on record will automatically create a support ticket linked to that customer.
To create a new ticket from the Dashboard, go to Support > Tickets and choose New Ticket. To associate the Ticket to an existing customer, choose the customer's email address in the Requester field (required).
Alternatively, from the Order Details View, you can select from Actions menu and choose to Create Ticket. The Customer and Order details will automatically populate into the new ticket.
Choose any ticket from the Tickets list, or from the Inbox, to open the Ticket view.
You may optionally select to apply a Macro to automate your ticket response based on pre-set macro templates
Optionally choose to Apply Macro for templated responses
From the Ticket view you can perform the following actions:
- View Customer Info - this links to the customer associated to the support inquiry. This is also called the Requester.
- Assign the ticket to a user Group, an Assignee, and associate the ticket to a specific Order.
- Associate Product(s) to the Ticket
- Select a Ticket Type to associate the ticket to your predefined list of dispositions.
- Assign a Priority to the ticket.
- Responding to the ticket with a Public Reply will automatically email to the customer your response. Create an Internal Note to comment on the ticket and keep the response visible only to internal staff and not the customer. You may attach files to ticket updates.
- Submit your updates to the ticket and update the status:
- Open
- Pending
- Solved
To set up Macros for use in automating your most common Ticket responses and tasks, navigate to the Settings > Support > Macros tab.
Select Add Macro to create a new support macro. Under Macro Settings assign a Name to the macro, which will appear in the Ticket view's Macro drop-down list. Defining a Display Order controls the order in which Macros are displayed in the drop-down list.
You can optionally restrict the Availability of Macros to a defined User Group, to allow for multi-tiered customer support strategies.
Choose from the following automated actions
- Comment Mode - preselect a ticket's comment mode, either Public or Internal, to be automatically selected upon the use of the macro.
- Comment - add custom text to prefill in the ticket response upon the use of the macro. This content allows for the use of replacement variables (listed below) to be used to personalize the automated ticket response to the specific customer.
- Priority - set a ticket's priority upon applying the macro.
- Status - update the ticket's status automatically upon applying the macro.
- Type - set or update the Ticket Type of the ticket when applying the macro.
- Set / Add / Remove Tags - add, update, or remove Tags upon a ticket. Tags are custom metadata text that you can create and use to track dispositions, user actions, or other custom business scenarios. Tags applied to Support Tickets are aggregated for reporting in the Support Tickets by Tag report.
Variable | Detail |
|---|---|
{{ current_user.first_name }} | First name of current user |
{{ current_user.full_name }} | Full name of current user |
{{ requester.first_name }} | First name of ticket requester |
{{ requester.full_name }} | Full name of ticket requester |
{{ assignee.first_name }} | First name of ticket assignee |
{{ assignee.full_name }} | Full name of ticket assignee |
{{ order.number }} | Order number |
{{ order.status_page }} | Order status page link |
{{ order.tracking_link }} | Order shipment tracking link |
{{ order.tracking_code }} | Order shipment tracking code |
{{ order.carrier }} | Order shipment carrier |
Note that Requester is equivalent to the Customer who is making the support inquiry. Most often, customer service macros will make use of the Requester replacement variables to personalize responses to customers.
The Support Ticket system can optionally be driven by external applications or custom integrations. See Support Ticket APIs for more information.
Provide your customers with answers to their most common inquiries by building storefront content such as FAQs, Tutorials, and Policies.
Navigate to Support > Categories to set up Support Categories. Categories can be set to Public (visible on your storefront to all customers) or non-Public, which will only be available to users with Dashboard permissions. Set the Display Order to determine in which order the categories will appear on the storefront, and choose to Feature certain categories in your storefront's help section.
Depending on your Store Theme, you may have additional Support Content options available for editing via the Dashboard.
From the Support > Articles menu you can view, create, and modify new Support Articles, and assign them to Support Categories. Articles can be set to Public (visible on your storefront to all customers) or non-Public, which will only be viewable by users with Dashboard permissions -- this is useful for building an internal knowledge base for your staff that isn't visible to customers.
Set the Display Order to determine in which order the articles will appear within their respective storefront categories.
Choose New Category or New Article from the respective support view to view the content editor. Enter a Title, Excerpt and Body for your content.
Note that the Excerpt and Body editor sections support HTML and CSS, and will publish the content to your storefront carrying the Store Theme styles.
If your store supports multiple Languages, you will have the option to create separate content for each language in the editor view
Once you're up and running with your store's Support features, you can explore reporting relating to all support interactions, user actions, and support types, via support reports:
Last modified 1yr ago